376 THE WHITE PELICAN 



ask only for fish and an island remote from man. It matters 

 not, apparently, whether the island be baked in the torrid 

 heat of the Salton Desert or cooled by the sub-arctic breezes 

 of Great Slave Lake, or whether the fish are the tasteless pick- 

 erel of muddy Shoal Lake, or the delicately flavored trout of 

 sparkling Pyramid Lake, whose praises Fremont sang when 

 long ago he made this beautiful sheet of water known to the 

 world. Insular seclusion and food are the requisites, and 

 these are found in so marked a degree on Anahao Island and 

 in the surrounding waters of Pyramid Lake, Nevada, that 

 the largest known colony of White Pelicans exists there. 



In Pelican annals, this is historic ground. Here, in May, 

 1868, Eobert Eidgway, while naturalist of Clarence King's 

 Survey of the fortieth parallel, found White Pelicans nest- 

 ing in great numbers and added much to our then scanty 

 knowledge of this species; particularly in regard to the 

 shedding of the horny keel-like knob which appears on the 

 upper mandible of the Pelican prior to the nesting season 

 and is shed after the eggs are laid. 



The Shoal Lake experience whetted my appetite for Pel 

 icans, and Ridgway's published report, induced me to lay 

 plans for Pyramid Lake as possibly still a resort of this 

 wary species. They matured in July, 1903. On the sixth of 

 that month, with Dr. C. Hart Merriam, Louis Fuertes, and 

 two other naturalists, I drove from Wadsworth, forty miles 

 north over the sage plains and under the great cottonwoods 

 which border the Truckee, to a small road house half-way 

 up the western side of the lake. The whole region is con- 

 tained in the Piute Indian Reservation and, beyond the 

 houses at the agency near the southern end of the lake, this 

 road house was the only one seen occupied by a white man. 



Pyramid Lake is a marvelously beautiful body of water. 

 It is surrounded by treeless mountains, whose strongly mod- 

 elled contours mirror the purple shadows of the illusively 

 clear desert air, and emphasize the atmospheric effects over 

 and beyond the lake's ultramarine waters. 



